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Long Covid’s Debilitating Reality Takes Scary Shape
Covid “survivors” face potentially years of fatigue, pain, cognitive decline and heart problems
Dr. Bob Wachter has two words for Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, otherwise known as long Covid: “It sucks.” The physician, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a widely recognized Covid-19 expert, is seeing long Covid unfold for his wife.
“Now 5 weeks post-infection, Katie has pretty bad fatigue, some brain fog, and periodic headaches,” Wachter tweeted yesterday. “She’s an amazingly high-energy person, and now she’s wiped out most afternoons.”
Somewhere between 7.7 million and 23 million Americans and 100 million people globally have learned that even if their initial bout with Covid-19 wasn’t that bad, the symptoms may not go away for weeks, months, even years. Or they can get worse. Even deadly. More than two years into the pandemic, a clear picture is emerging of the disease’s debilitating long-term effects, which are so common and well-documented that they can now qualify as a disability under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
Treatment options for long haulers, as they’re sometimes called, are so far limited to existing remedies for the individual symptoms — painkillers or physical therapy, for example — rather than any cure or even a helpful Band-Aid for the underlying cause of the broad range of effects. In fact, a CDC long Covid web page doesn’t even have a section on treatment; instead, it has a section titled Living with Long Covid, which notes that symptoms may last years.
“Tens of millions of people with Covid will have ongoing symptoms that interfere with quality of life,” Wachter writes. “In some they’ll be disabling.”
The staggering numbers are evident now
Long covid has begun when symptoms last beyond three months from initial infection, World Health Organization says, though the CDC considers it to be underway after the four-week mark. According to a review of statistical studies earlier this year, 49% of people diagnosed with Covid-19 have ongoing symptoms four months later. Long haulers are more likely to be women than men, the…
